Dave Myers: A plate of really good sushi. I love sushi! No, I'd have crab with some brown bread. Because I'd have to have enough sushi to satisfy my appetite, and that's a problem – I'd need four bento boxes!

What foodstuff would you put in Room 101?

D: Tripe - I absolutely hate it. My dad used to eat raw tripe soaked in malt vinegar when I was a kid. He used to have Bakelite dentures, and I can still see them slipping around these strips of vinegary rubber. When we were in Romania, one of their national dishes is ciorba de burta – tripe soup. It smells of widdle.

S: I had a bit - I love it! The only thing I'd put in Room 101 is McDonalds. You could do without it, couldn't you? It contributes absolutely nothing - except spots. Spots and litter. I hate it.

What's your favourite table?

D: I think at the moment mine's Sharrow Bay in Ullswater. I go there about once a quarter to treat myself. It's the most exquisite location and it's got a Michelin star. The chef has been there for about 30 years, but his food is modern, it's moved with the times. When I'm eating it, I push the food around the plate because I don't want to finish. Every time I go, I just know it's going to be wonderful. It's an old classic.

D: One that we both like is Pearl in Holborn, London. The head chef, Jun Tanaka, is a Japanese guy who's a classically trained French cook - he trained at Le Gavroche. It sounds awful fancy, but it's not really. It's wonderful, wonderful food. That's the joint choice.

D: I've got to go for Fentiman's ginger beer as well. Some tastes we share. Alcoholic, I think it's got to be good white burgundy. If we're talking dreams, I'd would say Montrachet or a Meursault. Not every day! But it's one of those nice things in life.

Si's a red wine fanatic; I'm a white wine fanatic. Which is good, because it means you get a bottle to yourself!

Which book gets you cooking?

S: One I use a lot, especially at this time of year, is Elizabeth David's French Country Cooking. There are some really good workable recipes in there – they're a bit odd, but I like them because they've got charm.

D: One I use a lot is the Italian one, the Silver Spoon. You want a cookbook that you keep in the kitchen and go, 'Artichokes – what do I do with those?' That's a functional book.

S: And it's sometimes just about ideas. You've got the ingredients; you just want a little take on them. It's not even that you're following a recipe.

D: Yeah, if you want a risotto, they've got 20 recipes, and they're not terribly complicated. It's just such a massive tome.

What's your dream dinner party line-up?

S: Cary Grant, Che Guevara, Jesus Christ, Isabelle Adjani and …

D: Oi! Do I get an invite or what?

S: Yeah! I'm just getting through the personalities first – you're my mate. You'd be there anyway, we're joined at the hip.

D: I'd have Penelope Cruz, Audrey Hepburn and the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. And Kingy [Simon]. That would be great, wouldn't it? That would be a great night out.

S: That would be four nights out. No, that would be four whole days!

D: Can you imagine Rossetti's first sighting of Penelope? Forget the lasses with the big hair. "Penny, let's party baby!"

What was your childhood teatime treat?

D: Fishfinger sandwiches with ketchup and Lurpak.

S: Bacon sandwiches. It still is now!

What would you cook to impress a date?

S: Fish. That always works. Fish and something that you need to suck, like asparagus.

S: You want to be out of the kitchen pretty quick, too. Fruits de mer and crisp white wine would be good. And for dessert, a pineapple brulee.

D: Or maybe a small, dark Belgian chocolate mousse …

S: I need to go home! I've been on the road for four and a half years, man, it's killing me!

D: I'm getting worried.

S: You lock your door at night now mate, don't you?

Who would you most like to cook for?

S: My kids and my wife at the minute.

D: Audrey Hepburn. She grew up basically starving, during the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands. That's one of the reasons why she never put weight on. She suffered terribly, and she was terribly poor. She went from that to becoming one of the most iconic film stars in the world. I think she would have appreciated something simple, wonderful and delicate, cooked with a bit of love.

S: I love cooking for my mates. That moment when you put the plate down in front of them – I absolutely love that. It's instant gratification.

What was your most memorable meal?

D: We had a meal in Hanoi, with a chef called Didier Corlou. He runs a Vietnamese restaurant at the Metropole, one of the finest hotels in Hanoi. He's mad as a bucket of frogs. He's got 80 people working in his kitchen and he's created Vietnamese street food within a five-star hotel. He hasn't corrupted it, he's just put a classic French twist on it.

He said to us: "I will take you on a tour from the Mekong Delta in the south to the Chinese border in the north." We had a 12-course tasting menu, and it was just the most incredible journey. We were like, "Crikey, what's coming next?" It was perfect - and so unpretentious. One of the best meals of my life.

He's retired now, so there's no way we could go back.

S: When you have a meal like that, it becomes an event. It's not just about the food.

D: We went into his office and there were test tubes and little packets … He has people who work with the indigenous people in the hills, finding new spices and berries. He said: "Taste this!" I picked a berry up and ate it, and my mouth went numb. He said: "No, not that one - one pinch is for a huge pot. You'll be able to taste something again in about a day."

S: We had Vietnamese civet coffee – the stuff that has been through a weasel – scattered with bee's pollen. We asked how he got the pollen, and he said: "With a brush." What?! "I catch the bee, and I brush the pollen off." Unbelievable.

D: He's just nuts! We were transfixed. We didn't have the budget to eat there, but we thought we'd just do it. And then he wouldn't charge us a brass farthing.

What was your biggest food disaster?

S: We always have disasters. On telly, one of the disasters we had was with a great recipe: a crab soufflé. We cooked it on a catamaran crossing over the Irish sea.

D: Every time we hit a wave, the soufflé collapsed.

S: It wasn't the brightest thing to do on a boat …

D: Once it was on the plate, honestly, it was like two cheesy crab beermats. In the picture in our book, it's like Vesuvius!

What's the worst meal you've ever had?

D: Last week in a Holiday Inn in Harrogate. The food came, and it was disgusting. I knew the Thai green chicken curry was going to be bad, but this plumbed new depths: it was appalling. The salads were terrible – they were slimy on the bottom – and it was expensive. Really it was our on fault for not going outside the hotel, but we'd been filming all day and we were tired. But this was unreal.

S: I hate motorway services, and I've had some absolute corkers. Once there was just nothing I wanted to eat, but I needed to get some fuel inside me. I had a pie, because I thought it was the one thing they couldn't get wrong. It was properly inedible – you just couldn't eat it. It wasn't that it had been oversalted or anything: it just stank. It was rank. I took it back and said it was absolutely outrageous. They clocked who I was, and the world fell out their butt. I said: "I can't eat this, and you shouldn't be serving it." They could kill somebody – if an old lady ate that and she was a bit frail, she'd be dead.

D: One of the worst meals we had collectively was a goat's penis hotpot in Vietnam. Can you imagine eating goat's penis that's been stewed? It hasn't got that cut-and-come-again factor.

S: No pun intended! [Shrieks of laughter]

What's the most outlandish thing you've ever eaten?

S: A black scorpion was pretty weird, but once you've got over the fact that it's a scorpion and you've taken the sting out of its tail, it tastes like a pork scratching.

D:Mopane worms in Africa. They one of the most revolting things to eat, but they're a major source of protein. People put them on the roofs of their houses to dry them – they're like a big sun-dried caterpillar. It's like teenagers' rotting trainers mixed with rotting beef, going off at the cortex of your brain. When you chew it, you think it's sandy; it's not. It's because the caterpillar's got lots of little feet.

Who's your food hero?

D: I love Keith Floyd - I think he inspired people to cook. Certainly in his first series, Floyd on Fish – the British were terrible before that. He made cookery entertaining as well. He's been up and down, but I still think he's great.

S: It might sound a bit twee, but my mam.

And your food villain?

S: McDonalds. I hate 'em! There's also a guy in the States who basically invented processed food. He's in a retirement home now, with a massive gut, and he still thinks processed food is great. No! People are dying, you loon!

D: I think Gillian McKeith. 'Dr' Gillian McKeith. Rather than getting people to eat linseeds and look at their own poo, we should be getting them to eat a more Mediterranean-style, mixed diet with good fresh food.

S: It's just sensationalist television; lies.

Nigella or Delia?

D: I'm still a Delia fan. You don't get a duff Delia recipe. Once I dreamed that she came to me naked with a pot of garlic mash. She's great; her stuff always works.

S: Nigella 'cos I wanna shag her!

Vegetarians: genius or madness?

S: Whatever gets you through the night … I couldn't eat a whole one.

D: Some of the best food I ever had was in vegetarian south India. But you've got a couple of thousand years of mothers experimenting with herbs and spices. I loved it.

S: Worse than vegetarians are the people who don't know where their meat is coming from, who don't realise that it was a living, breathing animal and think it just comes in a plastic bag from Tesco.

Muesli or fry-up?

S: Both. I really do like both!

D: Muesli to start, then fry-up! I reckon it's the breakfast fry-ups that are killing me. By Christ, I love 'em. I've tried doing the muesli gig, but I follow it up with a bacon sandwich. I tell you what though, I'd rather have museli than a bad fry-up [cue a ten-minute diatribe on bad cooked breakfasts].

Starter or pudding?

S: Starters. Absolutely definitely, all the time.

D: Yeah, preferably two. We get one each and then we get a third one 'for the table'. Which is fundamentally one-and-a-half starters each. Six starters would be good – I really like starters. That's going to be my epitaph: 'Are we having starters?'

S: I've got several of your epitaphs written down …

Fusion food or Best of British?

D: I like both. We're a multicultural society and we benefit from that. The Asian food we've got now is fab, Thai food's good, Polish food …

S: That's the best of British, though, isn't it? Because we have an eclectic society, for us that is British food. It's all about using good British ingredients in ways that expand our palates.

What's the best/worst thing about the British food scene?

S: The optimism and the fact that it's so cosmopolitan. The worst thing is that good food is more affordable for some people than others. Not everyone has access to a decent market like Bury's. Farm shops are doing very well, but you have to have a car for that. There's still a deep level of poverty in the UK.

D: I think the monopoly that supermarkets have is worrying. I'm not anti-supermarket, but some are a bit draconian.

What's the next big thing?

D: Baking!

S: Fish! Please God, let it be fish. It never ceases to amaze me that the British don't eat more fish: 70% of what we catch is exported. I think we frightened of it. And baking - we got 4.2 million viewers for a series on baking, so if anyone wants to publish our book …

What would you do if you weren't Hairy Bakers?

D: I'd be an antiques dealer. I had an antiques shop for a couple of years and I've got an art history background. I really enjoyed it.

S: I'd be playing drums and I'd be a potter.

D: Kingy used to be a session drummer. We were filming with Alex James yesterday, and he's got a drum room. Kingy was drumming and Alex was on his guitar. You should have seen Kingy's face.

S: I was like, 'Fuck me!' I phoned home and told my kids, "Your dad's just been playing drums with Alex James from Blur!" It was amazing.

Make a wish

S: I wish that people in the UK would eat more fish.

D: I would like to open a sushi bar …

S: In your garden!

D: I'd love to have a daily delivery of really good sushi that I could rely on and I could afford. I moved to an island and started catching my own once! I used to make my little nigiri sushi, then go out on my boat and catch my flounders. In Japan they're really prized, but at home they're called 'shitfluke'. I was like Stig of the Dump, eating raw shitfluke.

· The Hairy Bakers Christmas Special is on Thursday December 11 on BBC2